Personal finance for indie hackers?
First, a little background about me. I've been a programmer for over 25 years and in my day job I work on SaaS apps (among other things). For the last like 6 or 7 years I spent my spare time working on open source projects one of which has a sizable community around it. This year I decided to start doing something different using those skills.
I made a new years resolution to manage my finances better. I tried a whole bunch of the web apps in this space (I tried Mint, YNAB, Personal Capital, PocketBook, PocketSmith, Quickbooks and Wallet). Some of them looked promising at first but in the end they all have a number of problems:
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Some of them don't work outside the US and I found other people complaining about this issue.
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Most of them require or are heavily designed around automatically syncing your bank account. This is a great feature if your bank supports open banking API standards but a lot of banks don't. Typically the solution to this is to use a data aggregator like Yodlee which scrapes your transactions directly out of your bank. The only way they can do this is to store your banking password.
I actually had a huge fight with my wife about this security issue and found a lot of other people don't use these services for the same reason. Some people argue that they don't store your password but it's actually pretty easy to prove. Go sign up to Mint and then change your banking password and see what happens (hint: Mints bank sync will stop working).
In any case, even if the security concerns aren't real, there is a real perception of those concerns.
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Some of them do allow you to manually import your transactions with OFX files but in my experience they all suck. Importing tends to be very clunky and I built a prototype that works much better.
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I also prototyped a way categorise the transactions that I've never seen before. Some of the other tools kinda sorta do it okay but most of them really suck.
Anyway, I've been working on this idea in my spare time. It's definitely something I want to build for myself.
I know that building a personal finance app is a bit cliche and there's a lot of competition in this space. On the other hand, I have a feeling that if I build something that solves some of these pain points and works well for indie hackers and coders it might work?
Hi Dylan, I feel your pain. I am the founder of Lunch Money (https://lunchmoney.app) and I'd love to know what you think of the product. We are still early but we have a number of Australian users that use our CSV import feature and we also just launched our developer API in closed beta if you're interested in writing your own bridges between your bank and Lunch Money.
Otherwise, I totally support you in writing your own personal finance app. I don't think it's cliched at all. Money management is very personal and everyone does it differently and I'm convinced that you can find a cohort that agrees with your methodology. Cheers!
Thanks for the encouraging words. I really appreciate it from someone that is building something similar. I signed up an took a quick look around. I'd be more than happy to give you some feedback :)
The more I think about what I want to build the more I realize that there's room for personal finance apps that do things differently. I have lots of ideas floating around in my head but I think the hard part at the start is really narrowing down exactly what they are.
Yep! same concerns, same disappointments (from Canada), same answers.
I wrote an app to do exactly what you describe, both as a way to get up to speed with ReactJS and also to manage my own money. Currently dog-fooding at home, looking into productizing. Who knows maybe there's people out there that will find it useful.
Why do you need to categorize transactions?
When you say "works well for indie hackers" you mean small businesses? startups? that sounds like a cool niche.
cheers!
That's fantastic :) The fact that you're building the same thing for the same reason validates that I'm not crazy. Of course, it's far from knowing if it will work as a product but hey, that's part of the journey right?
That's actually a good question. I'm not really a fan of how most personal finance software categorizes transactions myself. I came up with a different way to group transactions into buckets which is different to how most do it. I'm planning on building that into an MVP and see if other people like it.
To be honest, I haven't really nailed down the niche yet but I know that it's going to be much easier to build something for a specific audience than it is to build a generic product for the masses. The reason I'm considering "indie hackers" as a niche is that I fit into that group myself.
Hey there, I love this post. Particularly your concern about security regarding importing all of your banks information.
I currently run a site called Financial Toolbelt (https://www.financialtoolbelt.com/) It started off as a few calculators and has now grown into a platform that has a financial independence tracker with ~1,400 users. I am mostly focused on helping people learn how to reach financial independence faster, stay motivated by tracking their progress, and keeping them on the path but am considering moving into other areas like debt payoff, savings goals, etc.
I do want to also specify that my app doesn't connect to any bank accounts as I had the same struggles as you with categorizing transactions, irregularities, etc. Instead, I ask users to track larger changes across all of their accounts. This also allows me to not have to ask for a ton of manual inputs.
I would love to chat more about your idea or get feedback (from anyone else who might be reading this too!) about what i'm working on as well. If you want to try it out feel free to sign up here:
https://www.financialtoolbelt.com/accounts/signup/
Awesome site! I've seen a lot of financial independence content lately on YouTube and blog posts I've been reading. Probably because there's a lot of overlap with personal finance stuff of course. I think what you've done is totally in line with how I'm thinking about things.
I'm impressed by how many users you've got. It really shows that there are people interested in this stuff and that you don't really need to have a site that connects to your bank account to provide value. I'll definitely take a closer look at your tools :)
I'd be really interested to hear more of your story? How did you get into financial independence? What FI forums do you hang out on?
thanks for the kind words!
I got into FI because I got into some credit card debt shortly after college and decided to take control of my finances better. As I was getting more into the FI community, I really didn't like any of the tools/calculators out there so I built my own.
right now I mostly hang out on /r/financialindepdence and Twitter to get my FI fix. I am thinking about doing something with a community, but not quite sure what exactly I could do on the platform. Do you think there is demand for a FI community tied in with tools?
You might be able to tie tools into the community by allowing people to share their dashboards in some way. Obviously some people will be uncomfortable with sharing their financial information, but others will probably love it. If you get the balance right between privacy and transparency it could work really well.
One company that comes to mind that does this really well is Baremetrics:
https://baremetrics.com/open-startups
Hi Dylan, I've been thinking about doing something similar for a long time and have tried some no-code solutions. Happy to connect, I believe is a daunting problem!
I recently got into this same discussion with my wife! In the end we use moneydashboard in the UK which has some integrations with banks (I think!) but some of my accounts are clearly linked by password. The value in having this view over all finances was too high to give up and since it's a relatively well used product we decided to sign up. How would you go about doing this differently?
So basically there's only 3 "safe" ways that I've seen to get transaction data out of banks:
If you're lucky, your bank will support "open banking" which basically means they provide a secure read-only connection that 3rd parties can use to access the banking data without needing your password. There is a push by governments for more banks to support this but both governments and banks are slow so that could take some time...
Most banks support exporting OFX files which contain all of the data needed. The problems here are:
Obviously I can't do anything about a banks UX but I think having regular email reminders could help people get into the habit of exporting their OFX files. I also think the UX of loading OFX files into software can be greatly improved.
Thanks for the detailed response.. sounds like a problem worth solving! Definitely will be keeping my eyes open for what you do 👀
You're welcome. My next step is to build one key feature into an MVP and get more feedback. When I've got it online I'll make a post here on IH.
I'm having the same idea for quite few years. There's a lot of personal finance app out there, but non in my native language which is Malay.
I tried to come up with a simple one (Belanjawan @ https://belanjawan.com) and intend to iterate from there.
I guess the only gap that I can take advantage is, the local language. :P
Ha, well Malaysia has a population of 31 million according to Google which is 6 million more than my own country, Australia. That's a pretty big advantage ;)
I'm very skeptical about this idea. Indiehackers are, generally speaking, higher earning potential individuals who are or can be higher net worth. Additionally, IH types can and know how to research and make rational choices and need less personal finance help as a result. How will you overcome these two barriers with your solution?
I'm not sure I completely understand your question. In my experience having a good way to manage you personal finances is even more important as you start earning more.
When I was younger I only had one bank account and a handful of bills. These days I have a home loan, credit card, shared account with my wife, accounts for my 3 kids and accounts to keep funds for different reasons. Then I've also got a couple of different income streams to keep an eye on. Banks really don't help with managing this kind of setup.
Hey man! I'll do my best to clarify my comments. As indiehackers our needs are, as you and others have experienced higher (we make more and have more complex needs). However, that same group of indiehackers is more likely to have spun up a custom solution that solves their exact pain points right?
How would your solution, which is a little tailored to my needs, be superior to my own custom solution? Your own custom solution might be awesome but your target customer is you, who created a custom solution tailored to your needs. Does that clarify the dissonance I see with your idea?
That's a really good question. I'd be very interested to know what custom solutions indie hackers are already using. If you already know what they are please tell me? ;)
At this stage of the project I'm really just trying to learn what the pain points are for other indie hackers. I know what my pain points are and I'm curious if other people are having the same experience or something completely different.
What's your custom solution? I don't really know what my solution looks like yet and it probably won't suit everyone but it might be better than whatever they are currently doing.
My thinking is that there's a lot of indie hackers out there that are just getting started and don't have a custom solution in place yet or their current solution is pretty rough.
My solution comes from trial and error, a ton of blogs and some experimenting with what works for me. I'm not about to describe the whole thing on an evergreen post on a website but basically, I've automated everything I can and have decent insight into my money.
Im also 40+ so maybe not the target audience? Perhaps write an article like "personal finance for indie hackers" with a sign up for a consultation form and see what kinda click through you get?
I agree with your core thinking, it is hard and a little painful. I'm just worried about that the target market is the kind of people that figure it out, rather than pay for a solution